Irving Wallace - The Man

Tonight-it was becoming dark, no longer day, not yet night-she could see from his mood, so unusually low-spirited, so ingrown and silent (he had not uttered a word in all their walk to this point), that until now it was his own good nature and ebullience that supported both of them. But not these minutes, not tonight. His depression was only too apparent. She wondered what had caused it. She was afraid to find out.

They had reached the square.

He released her hand. “One second, Edna. Late edition of the Citizen-American is out. I want to see how Zeke Miller let his paper handle your boss’s first press conference.”

She waited in the gloom while he went to the heavily sweatered newsboy. She enjoyed observing George when he was apart from her. His thinning blond hair was so neat, his pointed nose and receding chin made him appear so intellectual (which he was), and the tweed topcoat, even if it was not exactly the latest fashion, gave him the appearance of Fleet Street’s best.

He returned to her, the newspaper opened, his gray eyes darting across it from side to side, then up and down. He was, she remembered, a remarkable speed reader. He clucked his tongue.

“What is it, George?” she asked.

“Congressman Miller’s unloading his big guns,” he said. “Look at the headlines over Reb Blaser’s by-line lead story.”

He pushed the front page before her, sharing it with her, an intimacy she appreciated tonight. She had meant to glance at the front page only briefly, for this kind of news was the last thing on her mind. But the headline pulled her eyes toward it.

The banner headline read:

IS THE WHITE HOUSE REALLY BLACK?

The second headline read:

DILMAN BEGINS TO COLOR LOOK OF NEW ADMINISTRATION

The three columns of bold type over Reb Blaser’s by-line read:

PRESIDENT DEFIES ATTORNEY GENERAL REFUSES TO ACT AGAINST TERROR KIDNAPERS OF JUDGE GAGE APPOINTS NEGRO FRIEND SPINGER TO “INVESTIGATE”

Edna’s eyes took in the three paragraphs of Blaser’s lead. Blaser had it from a source “close to the President” that Attorney General Clay Kemmler had demanded Dilman “outlaw” the Negro Turnerite Group for being behind the Mississippi kidnaping and for being supported by Communist Party funds. Apparently the President had rejected advice based on “well-known facts,” and had taken the first step in reducing T. C.’s brilliant Cabinet into “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet.” Dilman had appointed the Reverend Paul Spinger, a Negro apologist, to sustain his stand with “fiction” about the colored abductors. Dilman’s Black Hand had shown itself today, and it was redecorating the nation’s first and proudest house in its own dark hue. Not only had the President demeaned his high office and violated the nation’s trust, by attempting to treat with a known subversive and criminal like Jefferson Hurley, but he was dealing “softly” with a fellow African, Kwame Amboko, and risking our peaceful coexistence with Russia; he was refusing to come out in full support of T. C.’s minorities bill that would enable Negroes to “earn their citizenship” instead of commit crimes for it, and he was “reluctant” to sign the New Succession Bill on his desk that would assure every American that its Executive Mansion would remain as President Washington had wanted it to be and as President John Adams had known it.

Edna’s eyes skipped down to the end of the story. She read: “Tonight President Dilman is presiding over his first formal State Dinner in the very room where President Adams’ prayer is carved beneath the mantel: ‘I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.’ Poor Adams! Tonight President Dilman will sit with his back to our country’s prayer, having for his first honor guest to our House an African who is tampering with our lives, enjoying for his first official entertainment the anti-American wit of several entertainers of his own race. As one well-known congressman remarked, ‘We on the Hill are worried that we have a black Andrew Johnson in the White House, one with no regard for other branches of government or for the wishes of the majority of all decent Americans. We have grave apprehensions about the future. If the remaining days of Dilman’s one-year-and-five-month term are like today, then, alas, America has been pushed into a time of trial and infamy that will come to be known as its own Dark Ages.’ ”

Edna Foster was surprised at her shivering indignation as she looked up from the newspaper. “How dare they! Did you read that? As ‘one well-known congressman remarked’-meaning who? Zeke Miller, that’s who!”

George Murdock withdrew the newspaper and carefully folded it. “I suppose it is Miller-after all, the paper is his plaything-but there are dozens more who are apt to say the same thing.”

Edna could not control the quaver in her protesting voice. “It’s terrible, terrible, George. I’ve read some bad things-the President insists on seeing everything-but this, his painting the White House black, creating an Uncle Tom’s Cabinet, it’s-it’s scurrilous libel. He ought to sue. George, I wish you wouldn’t buy that newspaper any more.”

He had taken Edna’s arm, and when the street was free of traffic, he guided her across it and into Lafayette Park. As they passed the Kosciusko statue, he said, “I disapprove of this as much as you do, Edna, you know that. But what the devil, I can’t say as I blame Reb Blaser. He does what he’s told. He’s got a job to do like the rest of us. I will say one thing, he’s a darn good writer.”

“Then why doesn’t he write for someone decent? I think there is simply no excuse-”

“Edna, be reasonable,” pleaded George Murdock. “We newspapermen try to be truthful and honest in our own way. Blaser has to give in a little, just the way I do. Do you think I like slanting my stories the way I have to, full of corn-shucked pap, because my employer and audiences are conservative hayseeds? Still, I have to. I’m sure you don’t like working overtime, like tonight. Yet you have to. Do you think Dilman likes reading newspapers like this one any more than I do? No, but he has to and I have to, so we both know what’s going on. The country’s full of many kinds of people, Edna, and we have to live with them.”

“Well, I don’t want to if I can help it,” Edna said. Her wrath had diminished as they reached the center of the park. George’s objectivity and good sense always calmed her, and Lafayette Park, too, always had the effect of soothing her. Even as she listened to George, she had been peering across the artificially lighted grass toward the tree trunks, looking for the brown squirrels, and sparrows and pigeons, that gave her so much pleasure. They reminded her of the farm in Wisconsin and her childhood when there had been so little conflict and so many rosy dreams. She saw two squirrels at last, one scampering up the rough bark-covered trunk of a tree, the other following, and she felt even better. “The poor President,” she said. “I can see him opening up the paper tomorrow morning or before lunch. I always try to avoid him then. I can’t stand the-the way his face looks-”

“How does it look?”

“How does it look? Sort of like the face of one of those Negroes they knock down in the South, after they pull back the dogs and close in around him and start kicking him-I remember the series of pictures of one on the ground being kicked, his first look of automatic shock, sort of, then pain but not letting them see it, then finally a look of resignation, keeping the hurt inside so as not to give them satisfaction. That’s the way the President looks when he reads the papers. He doesn’t show much. But I’d hate to see his X rays.”